From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation Part 3

 

The most enigmatic scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. A cleric in secular clothing touches the face of a mysterious woman called Aelfgyva in a bizarre intermission from the story of Harold Godwinson's visit to Normandy in 1064. Some think its an allusion to a notorious sex scandal at the time - it looks like the cleric is amorously caressing Aelfgyva, and in the border below a naked man is touching his genitals. The Bayeux Tapestry was most likely made between 1068 and 1070, not long after the time Guibert's family started searching for a church prebend for him.

So last time I gave my best attempt at a crash course on the papal revolution. But now let’s zoom back into the juicy details of Guibert’s autobiography and see how all this played out at the grass roots.

We’ll firstly revisit that quote from Guibert that was the stumbling block that led us on to the papal revolution:

At that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics. Consequently, some zealots began railing against these clerics, claiming that they should either be deprived of ecclesiastical prebends or forced to abstain from priestly functions.

Now the specific moment in the papal revolution that Guibert is referring to when he says “at that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics” is in the spring of 1059, when Pope Nicholas II convened the Synod of Rome. This was a key point of escalation in the papal reform movement, as one of the most important outcomes of the synod was the creation of the college of cardinals to elect the pope – until 1059, popes had been installed on the throne of St Peter either by the emperor, the aristocratic clans of Lazio or by the Roman citizen mob. But it was also there that he continued what Leo IX did at Rheims in condemning simony, though he went a step further in outlawing all lay investiture even from the German emperor, who could continue to invest bishops once he had acquired that right from the Pope – this would be key in leading up to the struggle between Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. But what it also did was condemn clerical marriage, by forbidding any deacon or priest known to live with a woman from assisting and celebrating at the Mass. And as Guibert indicates clearly in this passage, these measures were widely supported by ordinary lay Catholics.

Early twelfth century fresco of Pope Nicholas II at the basilica of San Clemente Laterano in Rome, appearing no doubt as he did when he issued the legislation outlawing clerical marriage at the Lateran Council, which took place almost in the exact location where this fresco is, in 1059.

This event would have been one of the most discussed and divisive political events of Guibert’s childhood, almost like 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crash, the election of Obama, the Coalition’s Austerity programme and the raising of tuition fees, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump were for mine. And it really does testify to the growing power of the papacy that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, decisions made in Rome could be have effects on minor provincial towns in Northern France. But what’s also so interesting about this is that Guibert, despite being a serious Benedictine monk who struggled with self-loathing and guilt about his own sexual urges, finds the idea that clerics should be celibate too quite horrifying. You can tell from the language he uses to describe the campaigners against clerical marriage not as heroic moral reformers but as crazy fanatics trying to force good decent people to accept their ideology. Sounds almost familiar, doesn’t it! Indeed, as I’ll no doubt show you in future posts, Guibert was in many ways quite a conservative writer, who did not like the way politics, society and culture were headed. But why was the idea that deacons and priests should not have wives or have sex so radical?

Of course, contrary to what some historians specialising in the high and later Middle Ages (1050 – 1500), especially those specialising in sexuality and gender, tend to think, this wasn’t an idea that had come completely out of blue. Instead, the idea that clerics must be celibate had been floating around for a very long time. Here we are of course wading into incredibly theologically sensitive territory, as Catholics view clerical celibacy as an ancient and unshakeable apostolic tradition, whereas Protestants see it as an evil papistical innovation lacking in any Biblical foundation whatsoever which leads priests down the path of sin because they don’t have the right outlet for their natural urges (the marriage bed). Greek and Russian Orthodoxy sit between the two extremes. Bishops in Eastern Orthodox are generally not allowed to marry – indeed, they are often expected to be former monks. But ordinary priests and deacons are allowed to marry and have children, though they are expected to get married before their ordination, and this has been the tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy since the Middle Ages. Indeed, going back to late antiquity, the morals of priests has always been much more of an issue in Latin (Western) Christianity than in Greek (Eastern) Christianity. To Greek Christians in the fourth to seventh centuries, what mattered most to a church congregation was whether or not your priest believed in the correct theological doctrines, especially concerning the nature of Jesus Christ (whether he was more divine or human, or equally both). Whereas to Latin Christians in that period, and ever since, the question that mattered most was “is my priest a good man?” This is one of the many super-insightful things that Chris Wickham brings up in the “Inheritance of Rome”, which I’m still reading for fun at the moment.

The New Testament doesn’t say anything in favour of clerical celibacy. While, unless you’re Dan Brown, it is indeed true that Jesus of Nazareth himself was not married and never had sex, some of his disciples undoubtedly were. Matthew 8:14 mentions Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law – the first Pope was therefore a married man. St Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians 9:5, mentions that two of the other original twelve apostles, Jesus’ brothers James and Simon, were also married. And so far as we can tell from what Jesus says in the Gospels, he had nothing bad to say about marriage.

However, St Paul, without whom Christianity would have remained an obscure Jewish sect, had an ambivalent view of marriage. He may have been married before he went on the Road to Damascus, but by the time he was spreading the word of Jesus and writing his epistles he was single. Also, and this is really crucial, St Paul argued that being a lifelong virgin was the best possible choice for a Christian – in Corinthians 7:1 he wrote “it is good for a man not touch a woman.” This was because he believed that virgins had greater devotion to God than married men and women. In Corinthians 7:32 – 34 he wrote “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife. There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.” But this doesn’t mean that St Paul opposed marriage outright. Instead, he argued that men and women should marry if they couldn’t contain their lust, because that way they’d avoid sinning. As he wrote in Corinthians 7:8 – 9 “it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” And, and this is crucial to what we’re focusing on here, he did not advocate for clerical celibacy. In his First Epistle to Timothy 3:2, he wrote “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt at teaching.” Its safe to say that this job description for priests and bishops was the one most widely held to by Christian communities in the first three centuries of Christianity.

Where things really started to change was in the fourth century AD, when as we said before bishops stopped being just local community leaders and essentially became officials under the patronage of the Roman Emperor following the conversion of Constantine the Great. That in itself didn’t do anything to endanger clerical marriage, but the more Christianised late Roman society became, the more issues flared up. Along with the rise of the first Christian monks and hermits, an ascetic invasion took place in which the ranks of the bishops and other church leaders came to be filled with admirers of these holy men and women who believed that virginity was spiritually superior to marriage. I can’t possibly do justice to explaining the rise of Christian asceticism, all I can say is read literally anything by Peter Brown (a living legend) as he’s been the undisputed expert on this stuff for the last fifty years. Among the biggest supporters of asceticism were St Ambrose of Milan, St Martin of Tours, St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo. They were opposed by many people, including Jovinian, who argued that marriage and virginity were equally good and thus had a lengthy spat with Jerome over it. By the end of the fourth century, the ascetics had definitely won out over their enemies and almost all the writings of the anti-ascetic faction in late antique Christianity do not survive to us today, either being targeted for destruction or simply neglected over the centuries. And in the 390s, Pope Siricius made the first decree advocating celibacy for priests. Thus, by c.400 AD, clerical celibacy was the official ideological position of the Western Church and that did not change.

Did that decree actually make clerical marriage illegal and lead to any kind of systematic clampdown on married clerics. The short answer is, actually no. In the East, Pope Sicirinus was completely ignored and Greek Christianity has always officially allowed married priests, as I said before. But in the West too, for the next 600 years, clerical marriage was incredibly common and most of the time in most places basically tolerated. Indeed, it became normal for priests and even bishops to treat their churches as property that they could pass on to their sons. A good example is Archbishop Milo of Trier (d.753), who was a close ally of Charles Martel and may have been the uncle of Pippin Short (Rotrude of Hesbaye, Pippin’s mother, is his putative sister), both long-time friends of this blog. Milo was the son of Archbishop Leudwinus of Trier and his wife Willigard of Bavaria. He likewise had lots of children with his wife, and became the archnemesis of St Boniface, who disapproved of his worldly and warlike personality – fittingly enough, Milo died during a boar hunt. Not far from Trier, Archbishop Gewilib of Mainz was also married and was the son of Archbishop Geroldus. Gewilib was another warrior, who avenged his father after he fell in battle against the Continental Saxons on Charles Martel’s campaigns by slaying the Saxon warrior who killed him. He fell afoul of Saint Boniface too, and was deposed by him – back in St Boniface’s home country, Anglo-Saxon England, bishops were predominantly monks and therefore could not possibly be married. Some historians see a shift against clerical marriage, and certainly some Carolingian reformers were against it. For example, our friend Theodulf of Orleans wrote in the precepts for his diocese:

Let no woman live with a presbyter in a single house. Although the canons permit a priest’s mother and sister to live with him, and persons of this kind in whom there is no suspicion, we abolish this privilege for the reason that there may come, out of courtesy to them or to trade with them, other women not at all related to him and offer an enticement to sin with him.

Emperor Charlemagne’s own legislation left the situation much more ambiguous. In his General Capitulary for the Missi in 802, he wrote:

If, moreover, any priest or deacon shall presume hereafter to have with him in his house any women except those whom the canonical licence permits, he shall be deprived of both his office and inheritance until he be brought into our presence.

It is unclear whether the women included in the “canonical licence” for are just a priest’s blood relatives, or whether that would also extend to a lawfully wedded wife. Meanwhile the Penitential of Bishop Halitgar of Cambrai, written in the 830s, says a bit more clearly:

If after his conversion or advancement any cleric of superior rank who has a wife has relations with her again, let him be aware that he has committed adultery. He shall do penance with the foregoing decision, each according to his order.

What Halitgar meant by a cleric of superior rank is unclear. But what he’s saying is that if these clerics get ordained whilst still being married men, that’s fine, its just that they must swear off having sex once they’ve acquired their church positions.

Still, in the Carolingian period we continue to find plenty of married bishops, just as we also find plenty of bishops who led armies into battle and fought as warriors despite St Boniface’s condemnations of it in the 740s. Indeed, even Pope Hadrian II (r.867 – 872) was a married man with children, who remained married, sexually active and a family man after being appointed to the papal office. And among ordinary village priests and other lesser clerics, clerical marriage was normal and mostly unchallenged. We saw some of that in the Marseille Polyptych in 814. And as we go into the tenth century, we continue to see clerical marriage and priestly dynasties flourishing both inside and outside the former Carolingian Empire. In the cartulary of Redon in Brittany in the early tenth century, we see lots of priests passing down their offices to their sons for generation after generation. We can find lots of similar evidence from tenth century England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Italy and Spain. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England for clerical marriage in the period 900 - 1066 is plentiful, and most named priests in this period seem to have been the sons of priests, many of whom inherited the exact same church offices as their fathers, as painstaking research by Julia Barrow has shown. Indeed, many of these priestly dynasties in Anglo-Saxon England continued even after the Norman Conquest brought the papal revolution to England. William the Conqueror and Archbishop Lanfranc seem to have only really taken action against married bishops, like Leofwine of Lichfield (deposed in 1071), which is a big contrast to Normandy where clerical celibacy did make some headway in the late eleventh century, despite much division over it. Only in the century after 1150 did church reformers really succeed in imposing celibacy on English cathedral canons and parish priests. As a result, many churches in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England were basically the property of these priestly dynasties. For example, when the incumbent priest of All Saints’ church in Lincoln tried to give the church to Peterborough Abbey when he decided to become a monk there, the citizens wouldn’t allow him to remove it from the ownership of his family unless King William consented, a case which is recorded in the Domesday Book.

All Saints' Greetwell, Lincoln, today. Though the church saw some alteration in the nineteenth century, most of the eleventh century building is clearly visible.

A really good example of a clerical dynasty working in practice is the hereditary priests of Hexham in Northumberland, a father, son and grandson who held the parish church in succession from 1020 to 1138. The dynasty began with Alfred, who was also sacrist of Durham cathedral from 1020 until his death in 1041. He married the sister of Collan II, provost of Hexham to the bishop of Durham from 1042 to 1056, and together they had three children: Eilaf, who succeeded his father at Hexham; Hemming, who became priest of Brancepeth no later than 1055; and Ulkill, who was priest of Sedgefield no later than 1085. Eilaf, like his father, held an important position in the bishop’s administration as well, and from his marriage he had two sons: Eilaf Junior, who succeeded him as priest of Hexham; and Ealdred, who was a canon at Hexham Priory. Eilaf Junior became the new priest of Hexham in 1086, the year of the Domesday Book, and kept the office until his death in 1138, the year the Scots invaded Northumberland and were defeated at the Battel of the Standard.

Thereby, while the idea of clerical celibacy had been around for a long time, and influential in a lot of circles, and past precedent certainly did matter – the papal revolutionaries certainly did look back to the late Roman world, when the first calls for clerical celibacy had emerged, for inspiration a lot. Still, it had never been the norm down to the eleventh century. Thus, it was a genuinely shocking idea for a monk, someone who professionally had to be in favour of abstaining from sex, like Guibert, when the papacy launched a campaign to make clerical marriage illegal in all of Latin Christendom in 1059.

Why the Papal revolutionaries would choose to target clerical marriage as one of the main evils to uproot does deserve explanation. Apart from the ideological precedents given by late Roman and Carolingian churchmen, the main attraction of it all came with the idea of bringing all churches and their property under the control of the Church as a multinational corporation and being able to control who was appointed to them. This you could not do if dynasties of hereditary priests existed (the natural consequence of clerical marriage), just like you could not do it if churches were under control of kings and feudal lords (lay investiture) or if people could just buy their way into clerical office (simony). The other underlying reason, going back to the letters of St Paul which we saw earlier, is the idea that you can only be fully devoted to God if you have no distractions, one of which being marriage and family life. Thus, if the papal revolutionaries wanted their priests to be as devout in their service to God and unquestioningly loyal to the Church as a multinational corporation as possible, they needed to deny them marriage and family life. Moreover, celibacy would give the priests moral authority by demonstrating high levels of self-control, just as it had given monks and other holy men such authority in centuries before. This would help them be the enforcers for the Church’s broader programme for Latin Christian society as a whole.

 The reasons why people would want to resist this are as clear as day. Imagine you’re just a regular parish priest somewhere in Northwest Europe sometime around 1100. You’re living a comfortable and wholesome life with your wife, your son and three daughters, all of whom you love to bits. All of a sudden, an order comes from your local bishop, a former monk who has never married, that your marriage is not a real marriage in either the eyes of God or the law. Therefore, you must separate from your wife and children and never let them in your house again, or risk being banned from performing church services and losing your property. People in your local village or town start jeering and publicly shaming your wife, calling her a concubine and a slut. All of your children are now bastards under the law and the plans you carefully laid out for them have to be thrown out the window. Your son can no longer train as a priest and succeed you. And no respectable young man in the local community will want to marry your daughters. This goes in the face of what was perfectly normal in your father and grandfather’s day, and you know that priests, bishops and even popes in the early church were married. You might feel tempted to tell him to f*** off and just carry on as you are. You can try to reason with him, pointing to church history and morality – if you can’t have a wife, your natural urges might lead you and other married clerics to fornicate with, you know, actual prostitutes, a mortal sin. Or you might get sympathetic neighbours to throw stones at the bishop or his agent. Or you might even go about writing pamphlets and speeches suggesting that this all a conspiracy by sodomite bishops and monks, trying to direct the new religious fervour of the common people against good honest married clerics, while they’re busy pulling and sucking each other off in their dormitories. All of these first three responses to the reformers are attested Normandy in the last quarter of the eleventh century by Orderic Vitalis, and the fourth response was taken by the cleric and poet Serlo of Bayeux. Its notable that one of the main champions of clerical celibacy in England, none other than Guibert’s former friend and tutor Anselm of Canterbury, was almost certainly gay. As William of Malmesbury wrote, at the Council of Westminster in 1102 there were going to be laws passed against sodomy in the monasteries, but Archbishop Anselm suspiciously decided not to promulgate them at the last minute. To many people at the time, reformers championing clerical celibacy were nothing but rank hypocrites.

In many ways, this is a story that resonates with our own times, in more ways than one, and historians writing about this period often slip into casting one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies, depending on their personal and political inclinations. The Gregorian reformers/ papal revolutionaries can seem like the good guys, as stalwart progressives who were trying to stamp out corruption and nepotism and make priests more upright and accountable. On the other hand, their opponents among the parish clergy can seem like the good guys, as honest, down-to-earth folks who were really doing their duties as best as they could but had fallen victim to snobby aristocratic bishops and hypocritical do-gooder monks who wanted to destroy established traditions and local communities in the name of their radical ideology. Likewise, both can seem like the bad guys in the face of twenty-first century sensibilities. The Gregorian reformers were undoubtedly misogynistic, essentially saying that women were to blame for bad priests and as soon as they put them away the better, and some would say that clerical celibacy is directly to blame for the current problem of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. On the other hand, their opponents resorted to what we would now recognise as homophobia in their polemics against the reformers, and essentially held to the belief, common among modern anti-feminist movements, that heterosexual men can’t control their lust and that without a wife or a stable long-term relationship they’ll shag any woman with a pulse. I’ve tried my best to be as impartial and empathetic as I can to both sides. Guibert was impartial on the matter in his own characteristically downbeat way, as we’ll see.

Now there were not one but two people helping bat for Guibert in getting that church prebend at Clermont. The first was of course his brother, a knight of the castle of Clermont whom the lord owed a debt. The other was his brother, a layman whom the local bishop had illegally made abbot of the very collegiate church where Guibert was going to get his prebend as a priest. Guibert describes his cousin, whom he detested, thus:

It just so happened that one of these zealots was a certain nephew of my father. This man, who was more powerful and cunning than his peers, would indulge in sex like such an animal that he would never put off having a woman when he wanted one, and yet to hear him rail against clerics regarding this particular canon [the ban of clerical marriage], one would have thought he was motivated by a singular modesty and distaste for such things … He could never be chained to a woman through marriage, for he never intended to be shackled by such bonds … Finding a pretence by which I might benefit at the expense of a certain well-placed priest, he began pressing the lord of the castle … For contrary to every law, human and divine, this man had been authorised by the bishop to be the abbot of that very church. Thus, even though he himself had not been canonically appointed, he was demanding of the canons that they respect the canons.

Much like in Serlo of Bayeux’s polemics, here the supporters of the papal revolution are hypocrites. All except here, the hypocrite in question (Guibert’s cousin) is not a covert homosexual, but a red-blooded openly promiscuous heterosexual. Guibert describes him both with vitriol and his outstanding verbal wit and sense of irony, and in doing so sums up what many people felt at the time about the reformers – that they were preachy and self-righteous, but ultimately more morally bankrupt than the clerics they were trying to cast aside.  

What did the poor married priest, whose job Guibert’s relatives were trying to steal to give to Guibert, do about this. Well, he took the nuclear option. Beat these revolutionaries and fanatics at their own game by turning their own principles against them. Guibert relates it thus:

At this time, it was not only a serious offence for members of the highest orders and canons to be married, but it was also considered a crime to purchase those offices involving no pastoral care … Those who took the side of the cleric deprived of his prebend as well as many contemporaries of mine, started murmuring about simony as well as the excommunications that had recently proliferated.

Now if there was anything more sure-fire to bring the ecclesiastical authorities and popular opinion on your side, it was accusations of simony. As I’ve explained before, outlawing simony was a cause celebre of the Gregorian Reform movement as well as imposing clerical celibacy. And most people could get behind it on that. As I explained to my year 10s when I was teaching them the church reforms of Archbishop Lanfranc as part of their Norman Conquest GCSE unit, having a simoniac priest in the eleventh century would be like having a local GP or a headteacher who had purchased their position rather than getting it on merit now. It was absolutely scandalous, because the church for people in the eleventh century was like the school system and the NHS for us today and so they wanted priests who were honest, upright and well-qualified for the job. And in trying to secure a church position for Guibert through a debt his lord owed him, what was his brother doing other than well, you know, simony of course. And from how Guibert describes it, in this way the married priest was able to get public opinion on his side over an issue that had clearly caught the attention of the citizenry of Clermont.

Even though he was a married priest, this man could not be forced to part with his wife through the suspension of his office; but he had given up celebrating Mass. Having given the divine mysteries less importance than his own body, he justly escaped the punishment that he thought he had escaped by renouncing the sacrifice. Once he was stripped of his canonical office, there being nothing left to deter him, he began publicly celebrating mass again while keeping his wife. Then a rumour spread that, in the course of these ceremonies he pronounced excommunication on my mother and her family and repeated it several days in a row. My mother, who always feared about divine matters, feared the punishment of her sins and the scandal that might erupt. She surrendered the prebend that had illicitly been granted and secured another one for me from the lord of the castle in anticipation of some other cleric’s death. Thus, do we “flee the weapons of iron, only to fall under the shafts of a bronze bow [Job 20:24].” To grant something in anticipation of someone’s death is hardly more than issuing a daily incentive to murder.

So the priest had successfully mobilised the local community against Guibert’s family, and by publicly excommunicating them in front of a crowd of the ordinary churchgoers who supported him, he was able to force them to back down. What Guibert’s mother then did next horrified Guibert, and indeed by the time Guibert wrote the Monodies, the practice of securing a church position in anticipation of the incumbent’s death had been outlawed by Pope Paschal II (r.1099 – 1118) at the Council of Beauvais in 1114. Thus, a would-be victim of the papal revolution was able to use some of most important weapons in its arsenal, accusations of simony and public opinion, against its very zealots.

As Conrad Leyser, who was my tutor at Worcester College during my undergraduate years has argued in a brilliant review article aimed at specialists, this little anecdote nicely illustrates the significance of the Gregorian reform movement as it was felt at the time. While it did nothing to immediately eliminate patronage, proprietary churches, dynasticism and lay aristocratic power from the church, decisions made in distant Rome nonetheless affected how people jockeyed for clerical offices in obscure corners of Northern France. Both sides appealed to the principles of the papal revolutionaries in their struggle over the church prebend at Clermont, one side doing so more successfully than the other, and both tried to get local public opinion, which was becoming very influenced by these revolutionary ideas, on their side. Indeed, in many ways this post and the two before it has been something of a homage to Conrad, who I really enjoyed being taught by, as they’ve touched quite a bit on his research interests and theories. Indeed, shoutout to Conrad if you happen to be reading this – you provided me with three years of excellent teaching and mentoring at Oxford, and you helped encourage and inspire me on my journey as a medieval historian, even though I eventually decided academia wasn't the future for me.

Sources used:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)

Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009)

Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, the Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, 800 – 1200, Cambridge University Press (2015)

R.I Moore, The First European Revolution, 970 – 1215, Blackwell (2000)

H.A Freestone, The Priest's Wife in the Anglo-Norman Realm, 1050-1150 (Doctoral thesis, 2018)

J.W Fawcett, “The Hereditary Priests of Hexham”, Hexham Parish Magazine (1903), pp.37–38

https://notchesblog.com/2016/02/09/the-manly-priest-an-interview-with-jennifer-thibodeaux/ - post by Katherine Harvey, in conversation with Jennifer Thibodeaux

https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/clerical-celibacy/ - post by Hugh Thomas

Conrad Leyser, “Review article: Church reform – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”, Early Medieval Europe, Volume 24 (2016), pp 478 – 499

From the sources 7: childhood and going to school in the 1060s

 I can’t tell you how great it feels to be writing a blogpost now. The last two weeks have been absolutely hectic for me with the PGCE and my mental health has taken a toll for the worse. But now I’m ahead with my lesson planning and have realised that I’m doing very well in the taught part of the course, I can sit down and write a blogpost. Given my current focus in life is “education, education, education” to quote Tony Blair (honestly though, with the possible exception of last year, when has it ever been otherwise), lets return to Guibert and have look at his education

But first, lets hear a bit about his birth and early upbringing. As I said in the previous post, Guibert’s parents were from the lower rungs of the Northern French warrior aristocracy. I also mentioned that Guibert and his mother were very close, if not in an entirely healthy way and that he struggled to relate or sympathise with his father, who was a knight. Guibert remarks eloquently in his autobiography that “in two sense of the word I was the last of her children” – Guibert was the youngest out of his several brothers and sisters, and by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1110s, when he was in his sixties, he was the only one of them left alive. Guibert also says that he was his mother’s favourite child, though he doesn’t try and make himself out as special for it – “aren’t mothers usually more affectionate with their last born.” Guibert also imagines his mother watching over him lovingly in Heaven, as well as sighing with despair whenever he strays from the path of virtue that she set out for him.

Guibert’s mother had gone through a terrifying experience to give birth to him. The perils of premodern childbirth are often exaggerated in popular history. While concrete statistics from the Middle Ages can’t be obtained, from the much better sixteenth and seventeenth century parish register evidence it seems more likely to have been in the realm of 2 - 3 in 100 women dying in childbirth rather than 33 in 100, as some people might imagine it to be so when they think of “ye olden days.” In other words, you were more likely to have a couple of women in your village or neighbourhood die in childbirth than close family members. Still, let’s not downplay it. Death from childbirth was a real enough and accepted possibility before modern medicine that, as we know from, again, early modern sources, women would make plans for how their husbands would honour their memory and their surviving children’s upbringing if something did go horribly wrong either when they went into labour or immediately after delivery, to say nothing of the extreme pain that would have been felt in any case in an age before modern anaesthetics. And in the case of Guibert’s mother things almost did go horribly wrong for her. Guibert relates them in chapter 3:

As she approached the end of her pregnancy my mother had been in the most intense pain throughout the season of Lent. How often she reproached me in later years for those pangs of childbirth when she saw me straying and following the slippery downhill path! Finally Holy Saturday, the solemn vigil of Easter, dawned. My mother was wracked with continuous pain. As the hour of delivery approached, the pains increased, but they were presumed to lead to a natural delivery. Then I turned around in her womb, with my head upward. My father, his friends, members of the family, all feared for both our lives. The child, they thought, was hastening the mother’s death; and the offspring’s exit from the world at the very moment he was being denied an entrance to it added to their sense of pity. On that day, except for the solemn liturgy that is celebrated at a certain hour, the offices usually sung for members of the household were not scheduled. The family held an urgent meeting. They rushed to the altar of the Mother of God. To the one who was, and ever will be, the only Virgin to give birth, they made the following vow and left it as an offering at our Lady’s altar: if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in God’s service and hers; if the child were of the lesser sex, it would be given over to a corresponding religious vocation.

At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking almost like an aborted fetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a most miserable being, and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had been saved. The tiny human being that had just seen the light was so lamentably frail that it looked like the corpse of a stillborn baby. The little reeds that sprout in mid-April in this part of the country are fuller by comparison than were my little fingers. On the same day, as I was brought to the baptismal font – this was often related to me as a joke when I was a child, and even during my adolescence – a woman kept rolling me from one hand to the other and saying “Do you think this little creature is going to live? I guess mother nature never quite finished this one. She gave him an outline more than a body.” All of these things foreshadowed the way I am living own.

(Source: “A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996), pp 10 – 11)

This is all trademark Guibert de Nogent – gloomy and self-deprecating, yet lively and well-written. And sure enough, the circumstances of Guibert’s birth did set him on his general trajectory in life. Because of that vow made when his mother was in labour, Guibert was destined for a career in the church. Had he been a girl, he would have had to become a nun. Because he was a boy, he therefore had to be trained up to become a priest or a monk. This wasn’t altogether unusual in a medieval aristocratic family. Normally, though depending on how many children there were in the family, at least one child, male or female, would be given a religious vocation. Having one of your children serve in a church or monastery dedicated to a powerful saint would enable them to pray for their patron saint to petition God to have mercy on your family’s souls and grant them a place in Heaven. In a way it was a kind of insurance. Also, to have a relative occupy a high-enough position in the church (a deacon, an abbot/ abbess or bishop) was always advantageous given the wealth, authority and connections that came with those offices. A mixture of piety and family strategies were always in the equation.

Guibert claims that his mother was most committed to this plan for Guibert, while his father had doubts about whether a religious vocation was the best plan for him when, as it turned out, baby Guibert wasn’t so sickly after all. But fate intervened to keep Guibert on the path that had been set out for him before his birth:

I was hardly born, I had scarcely learned to grasp my rattles, when you made me an orphan, dear God, you who were my father-to-be. Yes I was just eight months old when my physical father died: thank you so much for having permitted this man to die in a Christian state of mind. Had he lived he unquestionably would have tried to block the providential design you had for me. My physical build, combined with an alacrity of spirit natural for my age, seemed, in fact to direct me towards a worldly vocation; so nobody doubted that my father would break the vow he had made when it came time for me to begin my education. O good provider, you have managed a resolution that worked well for the well-being of both of us: I was never deprived of the rudiments of your teachings, and he never broke the oath to you.

 (Source: Ibid, p 14)

Once again, we have to be careful as to whether Guibert is being strictly truthful about all this. Not only is there the obviously parallel with Augustine, but also it was a hugely common trope in early medieval saints’ lives, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, to claim that the mother was always supportive of their child’s religious vocation, whereas the father was sceptical or outright opposed to it. The Life of St Gertrude of Nivelles, an early Carolingian hagiography of a Merovingian-era saint, is a case in point, and given that Guibert wrote about saints he was probably familiar with this literature. At the same time, there’s no good reason to be dismissive of his testimony. But anyway, Guibert’s father died in 1056 when he was only eight months old, and so his mother, who did not remarry, was left in complete charge of his upbringing. To give due thanks to Jesus and the Virgin Mary for saving her life, she was insistent that her son grow up to be a monk or a priest.

If Guibert was going to be a monk or a priest, he would need to be able to read and write, and of course that meant reading and writing in Latin. Latin was of course not Guibert’s mother tongue, which would have been the Picard dialect of Old French. By Guibert’s day, learning Latin wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire evolved into the earliest versions of the modern Romance languages. But everyone would more or less agree that this had happened everywhere by about 900, so more than a century and half before Guibert was born. Arguably, Latin would have been in some respects easier to grasp for Guibert as Frenchman than if he were a Dane, an Irishman or an Anglo-Saxon, given the similarity of most of the vocabulary, but the grammar, spelling and pronunciation wouldn’t have come naturally at all. Indeed, about 100 years before Guibert was born, an Italian cleric and grammarian called Gunzo got mightily offended when he visited the monastery of St Gall (in modern Switzerland) and the German monks there corrected him for using a noun in the accusative case instead of the ablative after a particular preposition like he was some ignoramus. Learning Latin in the eleventh century was thus something that didn’t come naturally to anyone (other than linguistic geniuses), just as is very much the case today. Since this was an age before printing, it was very hard to produce large numbers of standardised Latin textbooks, dictionaries and other indispensable teaching tools. How much Latin anyone was able to learn, and to what standard, thus varied a lot in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, you could find plenty of priests and monks who only really knew enough Latin to recite prayers and hymns, draft basic legal and administrative documents like charters and read bits of the Vulgate Bible. On the other hand, a sizeable minority had an almost perfect knowledge of Classical Latin and were well-versed in ancient Roman literature. Guibert was closer to that end. He quotes Sallust and Virgil on a number of occasions in his autobiography and he was clearly comfortable with writing in it about deeply personal subjects. But that doesn’t mean he found learning Latin easy:

I began to study Latin. Some of the basics I learned as best as I could, but I could hardly make sense of it. My dear mother, who really wanted me to be a scholar, decided to turn me over to a private tutor. In the recent past, and even during my childhood, there had been such a shortage of teachers that you could find hardly any in the towns and really any in the cities. When one did happen to find some, they knew so little that they couldn’t even be compared to the wandering scholars of the present day. The man that my mother decided to send me to had been studying grammar late in life, and he was all the more incompetent in his art for having absorbed so little of it in his youth. He was a very modest man, though, and he made up in honesty for what he lacked in literary knowledge.

(Source: Ibid, p 14)

Guibert leaves it quite ambiguous as to how he received his earliest schooling. But clearly it didn’t work very well and so he required a private tutor if he was to get to grips with Latin grammar. Guibert speaking about the shortage of teachers in his childhood (the 1060s) compared to at the time of writing (the 1110s) shows just how aware he was of the huge social changes taking place in his lifetime. This period saw a massive expansion of secondary and higher education in Western Europe as new urban schools, typically based in cathedrals, took shape. Some cathedral schools had existed since the mid-ninth century, but their number greatly increased in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and they marked a significant change from the school system of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, based around royal courts and monasteries. Why so many sprung up in this period cannot be answered here, because it would basically mean tapping into all the major changes (political, economic, social and cultural) taking place in the period 1060 – 1215. But its effect was that there were more graduates around who were in need of employment. And like with the great expansion of secondary and higher education in Britain in the period 1945 – 1970, but unlike with the post-1997 expansion, this was easily found. That was in part because the number of local churches, which needed priests, was growing across western Europe, but also because landed aristocracies were growing in size across Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside the proliferation of castles, which we talked about before. It’s likely that Guibert’s family had only been part of the knightly class for a couple of generations before him. These aristocrats needed educated men to act as their personal secretaries and administrators on their estates – written documents were a much more powerful tool for squeezing higher rents out of peasant tenants than just sending a bunch of men on horses with iron helmets and swords into the village at harvest-time, which was why bishops and monasteries were always the most ruthlessly efficient landlords. They also needed private tutors to educate their children, as was the case for Guibert’s mother who was quite ahead of the curve for the 1060s.

Chartres Cathedral, home of one of the most famous schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

How Guibert’s mother found his tutor is a very interesting story in itself. Of course, she didn’t leave an advert of Gumtree or visit an online agency. Instead, having consulted her household chaplains, she headhunted the private tutor of Guibert’s cousin. He was quite comfortable in his job – the boy’s parents got on well with him and gave him room and board (pretty good employment benefits). But his pedagogy, whatever its virtues, was wasted on Guibert’s cousin:

The boy for whom he was responsible for was handsome and aristocratic-looking, but allergic to the liberal arts, recalcitrant to any form of discipline, and for his age quite a liar and a stealer. He could put up with no form of supervision, seldom came to school, and could be found hiding in the vineyard just about every day.

(Source: Ibid, p 15)

Every secondary school teacher will have encountered someone like this boy. I have yet to personally encounter anyone like that, as someone who is only one term into a PGCE, but at my first placement school I have regularly heard my colleagues talking about such individuals with despair. Mutatis Mutandis. Thus, Guibert’s mother was able to snap him up, admittedly after the teacher had a strange dream. How did young Guibert find his new teacher? We’ll hear more about that next time.

From the sources 6: why write an autobiography in the twelfth century?

 

Meet Guibert de Nogent (1053 – 1125), the abbot of a monastery in Picardy, northern France. Guibert’s seventy years of life coincided with some pretty tumultuous and exciting events – the Norman Conquest of England, the ideological struggle between the German emperors and the popes that is somewhat misleadingly called the Investiture Controversy (the right to invest bishops was part of it, but far from the whole story), the First Crusade, the explosion of new monastic movements like the Carthusians and Cistercians, a campaign across the whole of Catholic Christendom to reform clerical morality and the emergence of urban self-government in the West for the first time since classical antiquity.

A self-portrait of Guibert de Nogent from his Tropologies of the Prophets shows Guibert (in his black Benedictine robes) offering his book up to Christ enthroned, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Lat 2502, folio 1

 Guibert had opinions on all of these things going on in the world, despite never leaving his corner of northeast-France save for one brief trip to Burgundy, as is attested in his writings, even if some of them are written from a quite parochial angle. He wrote a treatise on saints and relics, a history of the First Crusade called The Deeds of God through the Franks and an autobiography called the Monodies, which includes within it a history of his abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy and an account of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Laon against their bishop in 1112 which resulted in a short-lived urban republic called the Laon commune. Guibert is quite a household name among crusades historians, but arguably he’s most significant as the author of the Monodies, written between 1108 and 1115. Guibert called them the Monodies (Latin: Monodiae) because that term meant a song sung by one person. As Isidore of Seville (560 – 636) explained in his early seventh century encyclopaedia Etymologies:

Original Latin: Cum autem unus canit, Graece monodia, Latine sincinnium dicitur; cum vero duo canunt, bicinium appellatur: cum multi, chorus.

My translation: When one person sings, while in Greek it is said to be a monodia, in Latin it is said to be a sincinnium; indeed, when two people sing, they call it bicinium, and when many people sing, they call it a chorus.

The Monodies were the first complete autobiography to have been written in the West since St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c.400). Indeed, it is the shadow of St Augustine that lurks behind Guibert de Nogent’s work. Like St Augustine, who was hugely influential, Guibert believed that the human mind and soul were locked in a constant struggle against their own pride and the various corrupting forces present in the material world and this is the central theme that runs throughout his autobiography. He also believed that demons could assist in leading humans down the path of pride, temptation and corruption, and this will essentially be the focus of this series. And like Augustine in the Confessions, Guibert’s story is that of a boy who starts out with promise, goes down the path of sin in adolescence but later relents thanks to God’s boundless compassion and patience – indeed, both deliberately echo the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 431): Guibert de Nogent's personal hero and inspiration

One could also say that Guibert was to some degree writing in an established genre of religious writing, one which revolved around using “experiences (experimenta)” as “examples (exempla)” to teach good or bad morals. Many monks had written works in this vein, which could get quite intimate and personal, such as Otloh of St Emmeram (1010 – 1072) in his letter to his friend, William of Hirsau. Indeed, beyond Guibert’s youth, his autobiography essentially reads like a collection of anecdotes with moral lessons, in many of which Guibert himself is just a side-character.

Nonetheless, while this is a carefully curated autobiography, Guibert de Nogent as a teenager had been taught by Anslem of Bec, the great theologian and future archbishop of Canterbury, and had fully internalised his trademark saying “If I look within myself, I cannot bear myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself.” Also, if this was all just a moralistic exercise, or a story of faith and devotion to God being tested, why did Guibert focus on himself? Surely, he could have just focused on Bible stories for his experimenta, as Otloh had done, or the lives of the saints in providing instruction on how to live a good life and avoid evil, as these were more than sufficient for that purpose. There’s little doubt that Guibert saw himself as a unique somebody with distinctly personal challenges to overcome as well as ones that spoke to the experiences of your regular medieval monk. But note that he did not see himself as a unique somebody in a positive, celebratory way. This was a man who never learned to be happy with himself, and while a moderate amount of self-deprecation was de rigueur for a medieval monk or cleric (there’s plenty of that in the writings of Guibert’s mentor, St Anselm of Canterbury) Guibert takes it to excessive levels in the Monodies. Yet despite his crippling insecurities and anxieties was able to accomplish all that could have been expected of him and more in life and was not driven to depression and suicide.

Now, to get a sense of the general tone of the text, lets see first how Guibert begins his autobiography:

I confess to your majesty, O God, the innumerable times I have strayed from your paths, and the innumerable times you inspired me to return to you. I confess the iniquity of my childhood and my youth, still boiling within me as an adult. I confess my deep-seated penchant for depravity, which has not ceased in spite of my declining strength. Lord, every time I recall my persistence in self-defilement and remember how you have always given me the means of regretting it, I can only marvel at your infinite patience. It truly defies the imagination. If repentance and the urge to pray never occur without the outpouring of your spirit, how do you manage to fill the hearts of sinners so liberally and grant so many graces to those who have turned from you and who even provoked you?

Now, in a sense, Guibert is following St Augustine’s Confessions, by giving a meditation on the nature of God and his relationships with humans. His theological training from St Anselm of Canterbury is also much in evidence here – two of St Anselm’s great specialisms were in ontology (the study of the nature of God as a cosmic being) and moral theology or, in GCSE RS/ A Level Philosophy terms, “the problem of evil” (why does God allow bad things to happen in the natural world and humans to sin). But even if a lot of the language, very eloquent nonetheless, is quite generic, Guibert unlike Augustine in the first five chapters of the Confessions, makes it explicit that this isn’t about God and man generally, its about God and him. Right from the start, Guibert is making it clear that this is about him as a unique somebody, and a uniquely wretched and sinful somebody, who God with his infinite power and goodness somehow manages to redeem. To while Guibert is undoubtedly taking his lead from one of the greatest of the Church Fathers of ancient Christianity, and one of the most prominent Catholic theologians of his own day, he is from the start writing something original.

Later on in the first chapter, Guibert says:

O good God, when I come back to you after my binges of inner drunkenness, I don’t turn back from knowledge of myself, even though I don’t otherwise make any progress either. If I am blind in knowing myself, how could I possibly have any spark of knowledge for you? If, as Jeremiah says, “I am the man who has seen affliction” [Lamentations 3:1], it follows that I must look very carefully for the things that compensate for that poverty. To put that differently, if I don’t know what is good, how am I to know what is bad, let alone hateful? Unless I know what beauty is I can never loathe what is ugly. It follows from this that I try to know you insofar as I can know myself; and enjoying the knowledge of you does not mean that I lack self-knowledge. It is a good thing, then, and singularly beneficial for my soul, that confessions of this sort allow my persistent search for your light to dispel the darkness of my reason. With steady lighting my reason will no longer be in the dark about itself.

This beautifully written passage neatly expresses Guibert’s purpose in writing the book – to try and understand himself in order to be able to understand God. Right from the outset this is a deeply religious exercise, but Guibert doesn’t want a generic understanding of what God is like and what he does? He wants to understand him through his own personal experiences.

In the second chapter, Guibert goes on to think about the gifts God has given him in life. This is echoing St Augustine, who in Confessions 9.6 says:

Original Latin: Munera tua tibi confiteor, domine deus meus, creator omnium et multum potens formare nostra deformia.

My translation (bit ropey, but here goes): I demonstrate many of your gifts to me to you, my lord God, creator of all and with much power to shape our many deformities.

Here, Guibert remarks that all the things we have materially in life are gifts from God and thus we shouldn’t boast of them because whatever they might do for us in this world, they’ll do nothing for us in the next:

The more fleeting they are, the more their very transitoriness makes them suspect. If one can find no other argument to despise them, it is enough to point out that one’s genealogy, or physical appearance, are not of one’s choosing.

Some things can sometimes be acquired through effort: wealth, for example, or talent … But the truth of my assertion here is only relative. If the light, which “enlightens the way for every man coming into the world” [John 1.9] fails to enlighten reason – and if Christ, the key to all science, fails to open the doors of right doctrine – then, surely, teachers are fighting a losing battle against clogged ears. Any person, then, is unwise to lay claim to anything except sin. But let me drop this and get on with my subject.

Guibert then goes on name the first and foremost of those gifts God has given him, namely his mother “who is beautiful yet chaste and modest and filled with the fear of the Lord”, which nicely summarises Guibert’s view of what womanhood should be (he most certainly wasn’t alone in it!). Guibert’s mother is a very important recurring character in the Monodies, as we’ll see, and it is she who plays the most important role, after God of course, in steering him down the right path and away from sin and ruin. It becomes quite clear from the Monodies that Guibert was very close to his mother (even after he become a cloistered novice monk, she lived as a hermit in the monastery grounds and he would visit her), and that she had a very important influence on his personality, both positive and negative. It was no doubt his recollections of his mother that led to Guibert identifying a lot with St Augustine, who also had a mother (Monica) who was devout and modest, whom he was very fond of and who did a lot to try and steer him down the right path, in Augustine’s case towards Christianity (Augustine’s father was a pagan and in youth Augustine became firstly a Manichaean and then a Neoplatonist sceptic).  

Guibert uses his mother to illustrate the points he’s just made earlier:

Mentioning her beauty alone would have been profane and foolish if I didn’t add (to show the vanity of the word “beauty), that the severity of her look was sure proof of her chastity. For poverty-ridden people, who have no choice about their food, fasting is really a form of torture and is therefore less praiseworthy; whereas if rich people abstain from food, their merit is derived from its abundance. So it is with beauty, which is all the more praiseworthy if it resists flattery while knowing itself to be desirable.

Sallust was able to consider beauty praiseworthy independent of moral considerations. Otherwise, he would have never said about Aurelia Orestilla that “good men never praised anything in her except her beauty. Sallust seems to have meant that Aurelia’s beauty, considered in isolation, could still be praised by good people, while admitting how corrupt she was in everything else. Speaking for Sallust, I think he might as well have said that Aurelia deserved to be praised for a natural God-given gift, defiled though she was by the other impurities that made up her being. Likewise, a statue can be praised for the harmony of its parts, no matter what material it is made of. Saint Paul may call an idol “unreal” from the point of view of faith, and indeed nothing is more profane than an idol, but one can still admire the harmony of its limbs …

… If everything that has been designed in the eternal plan of God is good, every particular instance of beauty in the temporal order is, one might say, a mirror of that eternal beauty. It is created things that make the eternal things of God intelligible,” [Romans 1:20] says Saint Paul …

In his book entitled On Christian Doctrine (If I am not mistaken) Saint Augustine wrote something like this: “a person with a beautiful body and a corrupt soul is to be more pitied than one whose body is also ugly.” If therefore we lament beauty that is blemished, it is unquestionably a good thing when beauty, though depraved, is improved through perseverance in goodness.

Thank you God, for instilling virtue in my mother’s beauty. The seriousness of her whole bearing was enough to show her contempt for all vanity. A sober look, measured words, modest facial expressions hardly lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors. O God of power, you know what fame your name had inspired in her from earliest years, and how she rebelled against every form of allurement. Incidentally, one rarely, if ever, finds comparable self-control among women of her social rank, or a comparable reluctance to denigrate those who lack self-control. Whenever anyone, whether from within our outside her household, began this sort of gossip, she would turn away and go, looking as irritated as if she were the one being attacked. What compels me to relate these facts, O God of truth, is not a private affection, even for my mother, but the facts themselves, which are far more eloquent than my words could ever be. Besides, the rest of my family are fierce, brutish warriors and murderers. They have no idea of God and would surely live far from your sight unless you were willing to show them your boundless mercy as you so often do.

"Fierce and brutish warriors and murderers" with "no idea of God": knights torment the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius in this highly imaginative eleventh century manuscript of the Consolations of Philosophy from France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 6401

There’s so much to talk about here. The first is Guibert’s methods of argumentation. He always starts from his own personal reflections on human character, which he seems to have a keen awareness of, or on God and then elaborates on them with references to revered authorities – a standard method of argumentation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, given how much tradition and ancient wisdom was valued in premodern thought. Most of the intellectual authorities Guibert cites are the Biblical, or else St Augustine, though notably he does cite the first century BC Roman historian Sallust, specifically his discussion of Aurelia Orestilla, the wife of the wicked Catiline, the Roman aristocrat who attempted to overthrow the Republic in 63 BC, in his On the Conspiracy of Catiline. We might assume, based on our preconceived modern stereotypes, that a devout medieval monk would be hysterically opposed to pagan literature, but as I’ve written before such stereotypes are largely unwarranted. Instead, the pagan Romans were regarded by most medieval intellectuals as the best guide to skilled rhetoric and fine writing, and as deeply insightful if sometimes flawed guides to the natural world, the human condition and history. Sallust himself was a standard classroom text in medieval monasteries and cathedral schools, and so many medieval historians roughly contemporary to Guibert including William of Poitiers, Bruno of Merseburg, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon were intimately familiar with both his Catilinarian Conspiracy and his Jugurthine War. In citing Sallust, Guibert was both showing that the ancients had made the similar observations on human character to him, despite their differing religious worldviews, as well as also demonstrating that he was a well-educated man.

We can also see that Guibert wasn’t dogmatic in how he chose to follow authorities. While he agrees with Saint Paul that idols, by which he means physical objects that are worshipped by people presuming them to be living, physical manifestations of deities, are bad, he also says that they can nonetheless be pleasing to look at from an aesthetic standpoint. This also reflects part of his personality – as I’ll show you in a future post, Guibert did have something of a proto-archaeological interest in pagan antiquities, and even excavated a more than one thousand-year-old holy-site in the grounds of his monastery.

The final lines concerning his mother in this chapter really give us a sense of why Guibert wrote the Monodies. These “facts” about his life do more than any abstract theological reasoning or fine rhetoric could do to illustrate his arguments, by showing how it all works out in the here and now.

Guibert also has a very negative attitude towards his own family background and social class. As we’ll see, both his parents came from the lowest echelons of the Northern French warrior aristocracy – his mother was a minor noblewoman and his father a knight who owned his own castle. While undoubtedly this background helped Guibert get to where he was, as abbot of Nogent, Guibert sees it as nothing praiseworthy and disdains what he sees as the highly secular, materialistic and violent culture of this social group. Guibert was not alone here. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot and the most influential religious leader of the twelfth century, was full of denunciations of the vanity, vainglory, lustfulness and violence of nobles and knights – in 1115, a year after Guibert finished the Monodies, Bernard condemned the new craze for mock battles among young knights that were coming to be known as tournaments. And Guibert’s contemporaries, Orderic Vitalis and Abbot Suger, wrote invective-laden narratives about borderline psychopathic feudal lords who habitually terrorised churches and kidnapped and tortured merchants, men like Robert de Belleme and Thomas de Marle (who also appears in Guibert’s Monodies). At the same time, Guibert is a helpful reminder that churchmen and warrior aristocrats weren’t from two different worlds – a lot of the time, they were brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins! And the First Crusade gave Guibert a flicker of optimism for the warrior elite, while his contemporary St Bernard of Clairvaux tried to spiritually reform them and channel their martial energies to higher causes by setting up the Knights Templar with Hugh de Payens between 1118 and 1127.

Finally, Guibert gives us such a brilliant insight into the ascetic mindset, which can be really hard to grasp in twenty-first century Britain where the idea of going off to live in a monastery, giving up all personal property, abstaining from sex and living a life of prayer, hard work, study, contemplation and fasting to get closer to a divine being seems very alien and transgressive to most people. Particularly revealing is that paragraph about poor people fasting as opposed to rich people fasting, the latter deserving more praise than the former for doing so. A recurring theme throughout many medieval hagiographies is the wealth, noble pedigree and physical attractiveness of the saints (male and female) that are their subject matter being stressed – the point being that they could enjoy political power, luxurious living and sexual pleasure, yet they chose to spurn it all to pursue a higher cause. Perhaps then the closest analogues to medieval ascetic saints and monks today would be certain members of the environmental movement, like Greta Thunberg.

International women's day special: an early medieval mother's advice to her son (back to solid Carolingian content again)

Happy International Women's Day

After my wild excursion into the history of post-Roman Britain, that ended up becoming a monster post that went into some at once very exciting yet uncomfortably speculative territory, I can now say we're back in more familiar territory for me. It is of course, now, International Women's day. It is thus on this day that I want to celebrate and express my gratitude towards all the amazing women in my life, past and present. 

First and foremost among them, however, would be my mother. Besides providing all the parental love one could possibly desire for the past 22 years, it suffices to say that, without her advice, encouragement and support, I would not be the historian I am now and I wouldn't be on such a successful path as I am currently on. As someone who studied Litterae Humaniores at Oxford (1986 - 1990) and has taught Latin and Greek for over thirty years, I owe to her my love of the ancient world, almost as enduring as my (obviously greater) love of the Middle Ages, and if it weren't for that a lot of my interests would be very different. I probably wouldn't be at all fixated on the Carolingians and classical reception in the Middle Ages if I hadn't been so into ancient Rome as a kid, which was very much thanks to my mother introducing me to classical mythology and history and taking me round so many ancient sites from as early as I can remember. Through all the conversations we have had, mostly on our weekend runs together, she has provided me with immeasurable intellectual stimulation, and lots of constructive criticism of my ideas from her learned and intellectually-engaged outsider's perspective. It is also thanks to her that the very idea of this blog came into being, though it would take another year for me to finally get that one going. And without her providing me with lots of informal teaching, I wouldn't be nearly as confident with my Latin.

She's not the only one who has made me the historian I am now, though. I would love to give a shout out to my Granny (on my mum's side), who studied history at Oxford (1956 - 1959) and is a published historian and translator in her own right, though sadly she was never able to have an academic career for two very specific reasons which I shall not go into. I've had many immensely enjoyable historical discussions with her, and she's been very supportive of me going down the medievalist route, which was what she would have taken herself had she been able to do a PhD, and she provides me with an exemplar of how you can remain committed to historical scholarship even if your academic career never takes off - which is the overall likelihood for me. I would also like to thank one of my closest friends (if you're reading this, you'll know who you are) who works on the period just before mine, late antiquity (though I guess we both share the fifth century AD). She's helped me embrace who I am, including all my nerdy eccentricities that do much to fuel my work, more than most people. And our historical conversations are absolutely legendary, being both stimulating and downright hilarious. The one we had back in July about when did the (Western) Roman Empire really fall, is one I always look back on with a smile and a glow of nostalgia. Her influence has also probably been a contributing factor in me making the jump from late medievalist to early medievalist, especially in embracing the fact that less really is more in terms of sources.

Meeting Dhuoda

 It is in honour of my mother and all the amazing advice she has given me, and continues to do so to this day, that I chose to write about Dhuoda and her Liber Manualis. There are so many colourful, courageous and creative women who made history, albeit in circumstances very much not of their choosing, across the period I loosely specialise in (400 - 1200 AD) which I could have chosen from - from Galla Placidia and Clotilda to Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet I chose Dhuoda, a Frankish noblewoman from roughly the very middle of my period. I did so not because she's one of the more famous and consequential figures of this period, but because she's a rare example of an early medieval woman whose own authentic voice survives to us this day, in the form of an advice manual she wrote for her son. Its a very rich and wonderful text, as we'll soon see.

Firstly, a bit about Dhuoda's life. As is very typical with early medieval people generally, even the most well known ones (historians still argue over whether Charlemagne was born in 742 or 748), we do not know when Dhuoda was born. Most historians think she was born c.803, but that's only a rough guess. We don't actually know her family background, though its generally presumed that they were high nobility. What little we can say about childhood and upbringing is also a matter of educated guesswork. Modern scholars can't make their minds up about which part of the Frankish Empire she grew up in, and whether she spoke a Romance language or some Old High German dialect as her mother tongue - there's tentative evidence for both propositions. She definitely received some kind of literate education as a girl, but whether it was in a convent, from a private tutor or indeed from her own mother, we simply do not know. 

We do know, from Dhuoda's own testimony no less, that on 29 June 824, in the imperial palace chapel at Aachen, she married Bernard of Septimania (795 - 844). Bernard was a prominent courtier and the son of the great William of Gellone (755 - 812), duke of Toulouse, who would later be canonised as a saint by Pope Alexander II in 1066 (the year of Hastings) and become the subject of one of the earliest chivalric romances, the chanson de Guillaume (1140). In 826, her husband was appointed Count of Barcelona and military governor of the Spanish March by Emperor Louis the Pious, and Dhuoda accompanied Bernard on his early campaigns against the Muslims on the frontier. On 29 November 826, again according to Dhuoda's own writings, she gave birth to her son William - the recipient of the Liber Manualis. By 829, Bernard was becoming such a rising star on the Spanish March that Emperor Louis decided to make him the royal chamberlain at Aachen. This led to Bernard sending his wife to stay at Uzes, near Nimes, having assigned the administration of his counties of Barcelona, Toulouse and Carcasonne to his brother Guacelm, who became the new military governor of the Spanish March. Why he decided to do this, rather than taking his wife to court with him, we can only speculate about. Some use this to support the theory that Dhuoda was a native Romance speaker from what is now Southern France - it is thought that Bernard did this so that Dhuoda could use her local connections to help consolidate his political influence in Septimania (the region between the river Rhone and the Pyrenees that includes the southern French cities of Nimes and Narbonne). Others suggest something else was Bernard's mind on the basis of what happened next. 

In 830, Bernard of Septimania was accused of adultery with none other than Empress Judith, the second wife of Emperor Louis. We can only guess how Dhuoda herself felt about these rumours, but we know very well how the imperial court reacted. Thegan the Astronomer, who wrote a biography (Gesta) of Emperor Louis, believed these rumours to be malicious lies. Its quite revealing that when Bernard offered to prove his innocence in the eyes of God through trial by combat, none of his accusers came forward. The consequences of this were nonetheless explosive. Bernard of Septimania was forced to leave the imperial court and had his county of Autun, in Burgundy, confiscated. Emperor Louis' three sons (Pepin, Lothar and Louis) from his first marriage, to Ermengarde, who resented the influence of their stepmother at court anyway, were incited to rebel against their father, and the final decade of Louis' reign was filled with on and off civil wars between him and his sons. 

Almost immediately after Emperor Louis died in June 840, Dhuoda was visited again by Bernard in Uzes and become pregnant with his second child. Bernard took part in the fresh bout of civil war that followed, which I've covered in a previous post, in which he sided with Lothar and Pepin II of Aquitaine (Lothar's nephew and son of the previous Pepin), who wanted to keep the Empire united, against Lothar's brother Louis and half-brother Charles (son of Empress Judith), who wanted it to be divided up. Bernard was present at the extremely bloody and traumatic battle of Fontenoy in 841, on the losing side. As a show of good faith to his new royal master, Bernard sent William as a hostage to Charles. Dhuoda was thus caught up in the high political dramas of the ninth century Carolingian realm, It was in this context that, later on in 841, that Dhuoda sat down to write the Liber Manualis.

The Stuttgart Psalter (c.820), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, folio 33v. While this does not depict Dhuoda, Bernard and William, the three figures here from left to right might as well stand in for them, as no contemporary image (or indeed from any subsequent period) of any of them exists. 

The Liber Manualis

Dhuoda begins the preface of the Liber Manualis with an a brief account of her marriage to Bernard of Septimania - this itself is quite remarkable as we otherwise have barely any autobiographical writings by women (however brief) between the late Roman period (Perpetua and Egeria) and the twelfth century (Heloise). She shows a remarkable capacity for remembering precise dates - it is, after all, from her that we know when she married Bernard of Septimania and when William and his unnamed younger brother were born. 

Dhuoda then introduces the purpose of her decision to write the Liber:

But since I have been parted from you for a long time and am living, on the orders of my lord, in this city where I now rejoice in [Bernard's] struggles, I have taken the trouble, because of my love for both of you, to have this little book (its size in keeping with my intelligence) copied and sent to you. Although I am beset with many difficulties, nevertheless let this one thing happen according to the will of God, if he so wishes, that I might look upon your face once. Indeed I would wish for this, if the power [to do so] was given to me by God, but because salvation is far away from me as a sinner, I [can only] wish for it, and in this wishing my determination grows weaker.

I have heard that your father, Bernard, has commended you into the hands of the lord, King Charles [the Bald]. I urge you to do your dignified duty in this business to the best of your will. All the same, as the Scriptures say, "Seek the kingdom of God in all things and other things will then be given" (Matthew 6:33), those things which are necessary for you to enjoy your soul and body.

I don't have access to the whole text, nor can I give you a convenient summary here. Instead I'll take you through some of the highlights. In Book Ten, she provides a poem titled "Concerning your times"

You have finished now four times four years.

If my second child were to reach the same age,

I would copy out another little book for his person.

And if you were to reach the age of 36,

And if I were to see you again,

I would with more words urge upon you even stronger things.

But because the time of my end hastens towards me,

And sickness everywhere wears my body out,

I have rushed to put this book together for the use of you and your brother.

Knowing that I shall not live another twenty years.

I urge you to savour this book as though it were a pleasant drink

And honey-laced food meant for your lips.

For the date when I married your father

And the date you were born occurred on the

[same Kalends] of [different] months, as I told you above.

Know that, from the first verse of this little book,

Until its last syllable,

Everything has been designed for the purpose of your salvation.

That you may more easily follow what is written there,

Read the acrostic verses.

The little verses written above and below, and everything else,

I myself have composed for the benefit of your soul and body,

And I do not cease even now urging you to read them and keep them close to your heart.

A subsequent poem in the Liber, in the original Latin, has the first letters of each of the seventeenth stanzas spell out Versi ad Wilhelmum (verses for William): 

That you might be strong and thrive, O best of sons, 

Do not be reluctant to read the words that I have composed and sent to you and may you effortlessly discover things that please you.

The word of God is alive; look for it diligently and learn its sacred teaching,
For then your mind will be stuffed with
great joy forever.

May the immense and powerful King, be radiant and kind,
Care to cultivate your mind in all things,

Young man, and to guard and defend you
Every minute of every day.

Be humble in mind and chaste in body,
Be ready to give proper service,
Show yourself constantly kind to all people,
Both the great and the not so great.

Above all, fear and love the Lord God,
With your full heart and soul and expend all your strength,

Next fear and love your father in all things.

Do not regret continually serving,
The glorious offspring [Charles the Bald] of [that Carolingian] race,

With its line of ancestors, for he shines,

With the great.

Esteem magnates and respect those of high rank at court;
Be humble with the low;
Associate yourself with the well-intentioned; be sure not to
Submit to the proud and imprudent.

Always honour the true ministers
Of the sacred rites, the worthy bishops,
Always commit yourself simply and with outstretched hands,

To the custodians of the altars.

Frequently give assistance to widows and orphans,
Give food and drink to pilgrims;
Offer hospitality; stretch out your hands
With apparel to the naked.

Be a strong and fair judge in legal disputes;
Never take a bribe
Never oppress anyone, for the great Giver will repay you.

Be generous with gifts, but always vigilant and modest,
Make a sincere effort to get along with everyone,
Rejoice in humble things, for the image of this will
Stay with you.

There is One who weighs up everything,
A bestower who grants to each according to merit,
Assigning for [good] words and works the greatest of gifts:
The constellations of the heavenly stars.

Thus, my noble son, you should take care
And seek constantly to obtain
The great advantages [of heaven], and spurn
The fires of pitch-black wood.

Although, at sixteen, you are in the very flower
Of your youth, your delicate limbs
Age [along with you] step by step
As you proceed through life.

I long to see your face,
But the prospect seems distant to me.
Even if the power should be given to me,

Yet I still do not deserve this.

Would that you might live for Him who shaped you,

May you enter into, with gentle spirit, a fitting association
With his servants; may you with joy rise up again when your
Life is done.

My mind surely turns to thoughts of death,
But still I want you to read carefully the pages of this book,
As I have written them [for you], and keep them constantly
Foremost in your mind.

These verses, with the help of God, are now done

As you finish your sixteen years
At the start of December, on the Feast of Saint Andrew [30 November],
And the Advent of the Word.

Christine de Pizan (1364 - 1431) advises her son, Jean, before he goes to live in the Earl of Salisbury's household. British Library, Harley 4431 folio. 261v. Dhuoda was far from unique among medieval mothers in giving her son wise advice and caring for his well-being even when he was going to be absent from her for an indefinite period of time - some would say that motherly instincts never change.

Later on in the text, Dhuoda returns to talking about herself and her personal anxieties and shortcomings. She laments the frailty of her body, her slothfulness in failing to pray the seven canonical hours every day (this would become a major feature of lay piety in the later middle ages with the popularity of Books of Hours), sinning in thought and speech and taking on too many debts from Christian and Jewish creditors. Above all, she is gravely uncertain over whether she merits salvation.  She requests that William, maintain a spiritual link with her even if they can never have a physical one again:

While you see that I am [still] alive in this world, alertly attempt in your heart to exert yourself so that, not only through vigils and prayers, but also by giving charity to the poor, I might deserve, when finally seized from my body and from the chains of my sinning, to be received kindly in every way by our kind Judge.

At the end of the book, Dhuoda composes her own epitaph, in which she reflects on the transience and insignificance of the physical body, and requests that whoever looks upon her tomb pray for her soul.

Source for the text: Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 336 - 343

Thoughts and analysis

The Liber Manualis is a beautiful, intelligently written, moving and deeply humane text, that in itself is a fitting monument to its author and her intellect and personality. A lot of early twentieth scholars, no doubt motivated by sexism to at least some degree, were remarkably rude about it, especially its Latinity. But as Peter Dronke has argued in a highly sympathetic defence of Dhuoda, while her Latin style was orthodox and incorrect, both by Classical or Carolingian standards, and is often difficult to translate, that is because she was trying to express thoughts that were very much her own and which she could only express her own unique way. Unlike a lot of correspondance in this period, there is nothing that could have been ripped straight from, say, Cicero or Ambrose of Milan, and the only literary trope she really uses is that of personal unworthiness, which is to be found in just about every Carolingian writer - Einhard is full of it in his Life of Charlemagne and personal letters. Indeed, like Einhard and a number of other Carolingian authors, Dhuoda really stands out as someone who saw herself as a unique somebody and wanted to express it, which very much goes against what we've been taught to expect of early medieval people, and early medieval women in particular. 

For all that many historians may caution us that we cannot access the real thoughts and feelings of medieval people through literary texts, Dhuoda’s here, which were so complex and authentic she struggled to put them into learned Latin,  feel as real as those in any text of any age - her love and concern for her son, her sadness at being parted from him and the uncertainty of whether she’ll ever see him again and her anxiety for the fate of her soul. 

For all that Dhuoda laments her physical and spiritual weakness, things very much associated with femininity, she does manage exert a distinct kind of authority that the patriarchal society of Carolingian Francia can nonetheless afford to her, that of a mother. As Janet Nelson reminds us, Carolingian patriarchy depended on mothers as much as fathers and they were owed respect and obligations. And this is another respect in which Dhuoda nonetheless manages to stand out as a unique individual - while mothers may have advised their sons all the time in this period, none put it down into writing, nor for that matter did fathers. As Nelson points out, Dhuoda is unique among Carolingian moralists in standing on a parental platform - all the others were either celibate monks and clerics (Alcuin, Jonas of Orleans, Hincmar etc) or lay noblemen who, so far as we can tell, had no biological children of their own (Einhard and Nithard). 

The content of what Dhuoda writes reflects a wealth of not only personal wisdom but also knowledge of ancient and contemporary texts, including the Bible, the late Roman grammarian Donatus, the works of the Church Fathers like Augustine and Gregory the Great, the Rule of St Benedict, Charlemagne's General Admonition of 789 and Rabanus Maurus' treatise on Computation. This is testament to the depth and richness of learning that at least certain lay women were capable of achieving in this period.

Given her familiarity with all these texts, it is not surprising that what Dhuoda writes resonates so much with the aims and rhetoric of the Carolingian reform programme, which tried to create a moral lay elite and which concerned itself as much with inward spiritucal disposition as with outward public display of good morals - very apparent from Dhuoda's work. Indeed, her Liber Manualis is demonstrative that this reform effort didn't fall on deaf ears amongst the Carolingian aristocracy, even if the results across the board were very mixed to put it bluntly. It also shows how women could play a role in reinforcing it and not just in a family context - more than three copies of the Liber survive, more than do for a lot of later medieval moralistic texts like the Livre de Chevalerie of the fourteenth century knight Geoffroi de Charny (one of the texts I read for my undergraduate thesis). In a sense, Dhuoda wrote not just as a mother advising her son but as a public intellectual, and it does seem she had a public impact. Whether or not women in general had a Carolingian Renaissance (an inevitable play on feminist historian Joan Kelly’s famous article “did women have a Renaissance?”), and I think they did, if not quite the same as that of men, Dhuoda truly was a Carolingian Renaissance woman. 

As is clear throughout the text, Dhuoda wrote this when she was suffering from some kind of long term illness. If she lived much longer past 841, and we really don’t know if she did, her life, which had already been filled with much drama and misfortune, wasn’t going to get anymore uplifting for her. In 844, Bernard of Septimania was executed by Charles the Bald for switching sides too many times in the various civil wars and most recently having sided with Pepin II of Aquitaine in revolt against Charles the Bald. In 850, William, who managed to get awarded some of his fathers counties after his death, was judicially murdered by Charles’ partisans as part of the ongoing political turmoil in the South - ninth century Carolingian politics is depressing like that!

Dhuoda’s story is demonstrative of why the Carolingian period is so fascinating relevant to us today. It may not quite deliver what we, living in a post-Game of Thrones world, think we want from medieval history - the Carolingians want to limit violence, sex, and political corruption and scheming in favour of high mindedness  and building a better world, yet fail because various reasons and that hits too close to home and leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Yet it does show us how intellectuals, male and female,  clerical and lay, reflected on themselves as unique individuals and on the human condition, and sought creative solutions to their own personal challenges and those facing society more generally. They remind us how deeply human and indivisible people in the medieval past really were, something that us moderns have often been minded to forget, and how they struggled and did their best to cope with a chaotic world, which is very much what we are confronted with now.